Making Job Search Easier by Finding the Great Companies First

Well that was fast, relatively speaking, we’re talking about Blockchain of course. Ever since Bitcoin hit the scene a few years ago there has been massive skepticism and concern over the use of crypto-currency, primarily by governments and multi-national businesses that fear the loss of control to the public. Of course the Millennial generation has embraced this new frontier fairly whole-heartedly, with 92% of them firmly expressing their distrust of banks according to an early 2016 white paper published by Facebook IQ. While many people in the general public still don’t really understand what Bitcoin or crypto-currency is, or the technology behind it. But suddenly major corporations are embracing blockchain technology at a record pace, not necessarily for currency related issues but for other applications which can greatly benefit from the superior tracking abilities it enables. Survey Says Normally an internet-based survey has about as much of a chance at being credible as a polling organization during the 2016 presidential election cycle (zing! ouch!). However, when that survey is done by Deloitte one tends to give it the benefit of the doubt to some extent. The survey in question found that 12% of big businesses, defined as a business with at least $500 million in…

Ever since the Oculus Rift hit Kickstarter several years ago, VR enthusiasts have been on the edge of their seats waiting for the brave new world powered by virtual reality… which to date has been slow to come at best and a dud at worst. Oculus got swallowed up by Facebook and has been sitting in a pile of hopeful applications yet to come ever since. Samsung’s Gear VR is being practically given away on street corners in an attempt to gain users. Everybody else in the game is experiencing similar results. That might be because as cool as it is to sit in one place and be able to experience concerts or sports events from around the world in 3D while on your couch, and as cool as it is to be immersed inside of a game instead of playing as – really – more of an observer of the action than a part, the holy grail of VR is still what most people dream of and are waiting for. Anyone who has read any of my posts regarding virtual reality, augmented reality, or the like know that I’m referring to, of course, a Holodeck-like experience. True immersion comes when…

When Leif Baradoy was helping his brother move he found a drawer full of unused gift cards. This was the inspiration for Giftbit, the company Baradoy would go on to found with Peter Locke. Giftbit offers companies a service where they can send customers digital gift cards with set expiration dates through email, then follow up via email to remind the customers to use the cards before they expire. Because of their business model, the company loses no money if the customer doesn’t respond. “Giftbit customers are able to track, audit, and manage their gift card offers and campaigns down to the recipient level,” Baradoy told GeekWire last fall. The company received venture funding early in 2016 from Founder’s Co-op and Freestyle, and in the time between then and now have identified a need that they have just announced during TechCrunch Disrupt SF that they will fill, the need for a business to be able to create their own digital currency on the fly and in whatever form they want – promo codes, refund credits, or digital gift cards for sale. This new offering can help businesses in a number of ways, but the one that jumps out to me is retaining profits when a customer decides they want…

Well if you thought Uber had developed a lot of enemies in the taxi business before by bringing a new level of competition to the somewhat monopolized industry, you can bet that those enemies will be even more incensed with the company’s latest move – and perhaps ironically, bring the very drivers that they gave a new lease on working into the enemy fold. In the last week Uber has unveiled their fleet of self-driving cars in the test market of Pittsburgh, PA. But before you pull out your smartphone to jump into the future, you should know that not everyone in the area will necessarily get one of these autonomous vehicles when they call for a ride. And those who do will be joined by an Uber driver sitting behind the wheel just in case and another in the passenger seat taking notes. A handful of Ford Fusions make up the small group of self-driving Uber cars in the city, but there will soon be Volvo XC90 SUVs joining the fray, once they’ve completed testing in Sweden. And if you happen to be one of those chomping at the bit for a ride in one because you think it will…

“Everything’s becoming intelligent, but the limiting factor of intelligence is access to structured data,” Tung says. Diffbot, an artificial intelligence company that helps clients extract and combine data from multiple Web sources wants to scrape all the data on the web (all of it) to put it into a structured format. Making it useful for all sorts of business purposes and make money doing so. The company says its technology “uses computer vision and NLP algorithms to extract and structure any web page into the world’s largest structured database… with no human curation or oversight.” Founded in 2009 The Palo Alto, CA-based startup announced today it raised $10 million from investors to expand its “knowledge-as-a-service” offerings to businesses and consumer apps. They have raised close to $13 million since its seed round in 2012. Diffbot’s plan is to catalog trillions of facts across the Web—many of them drawn from page elements such as comment forums, which can’t be mined by traditional search engines. Web-mining can be a competitive advantage for apps as well as the proliferating devices of the Internet of Things, Tung says. The startup says it has made a significant start on that goal, having indexed 1.2 billion…